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The Absence of Power


   Jean Jullien, "Peace for Paris" (from @jean_jullien on Twitter)


Every discussion about the Middle East today, understandably, turns sooner or later to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Talking heads may not have yet sounded this particular theme in connection to what happened in Paris on Friday, but it shouldn’t take long. The US war in Iraq, and the long agony of Syria, are surely fewer squares away on the geopolitical board game, but I/P is still just a hop, skip, and jump. What will tie it all nicely together, as usual, is religion (from the Latin, re-ligare, “to bind”).

It might easily be assumed—and perhaps is dreamed today by the most delirious of religious radicals—that the key aim of the caliphate proclaimed by Daesh and its supporters is the destruction of Israel: the genocidal elimination of the Jewish state, along with much of its population of over eight million. For now, however, I don’t believe that is the goal. The attacks in Paris have made the true aim of Daesh apparent, even unmistakable. Rather than aiming to wipe Israel off the map, what Daesh wants is to turn the West in its entirety into an archipelago of Israels. Religious radicalism feeds off, and is nourished by, the foil it invents in the mirror.

Any discussion mentioning terrorism in the same breath as Israel walks through a minefield, so let me be as clear as possible. I believe in a Foucauldian dictum: that violence is the absence of power. Which means that I understand, but oppose, most heads of state on this issue. The French President François Hollande immediately declared the attacks of Friday the 13th an “act of war.” We should recall that the knee-jerk reaction of the US government under George W. Bush after 9/11 was no different, and no less mistaken. Though armed and destructive—albeit to a degree almost inconceivable before such events—the actions of terrorists are criminal, and must be treated as such.

To respond in any other way is to give the criminals what they want, to legitimate both their actions and their cause, in the very terms by which they themselves define it. Back in 2001, we called it far too quickly an “Attack on America”—and by “America” we meant an idea, a “way of life,” not the United States or its people—and so we declared a “War on Terror” in response. Not long after 9/11, the satirical newspaper The Onion imagined the White House urging al-Qaeda to declare a state, in order for us to attack it; it suggested that this fictive state be called Osamastan. The attacks on Paris and Beirut, as well as the downing of the Russian plane, we should remember, have come at a moment where Daesh’s self-declared state is losing ground. It has no legitimacy to lose.

Early this year, my wife and I happened to be traveling to Paris just days after the murders at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery. We joined the river of humanity that came into the streets to voice their protest against the actions and the views of the terrorists. In the days that followed, we did view with dismay the curtailing of free speech in various incidents around the country, but we also took pride in the open debate about the essential values and identity of the French Republic. Just last month, I was again inspired by the support given across France—including artists, writers, and politicians at the highest level—to Erri De Luca, in defense of his right to express his opinions. We will soon be back in Paris, and we expect once again to find common cause with a country where Islam is simply one recognizable thread among others, not a flying carpet of phobias.

The decisions of any state must be subject to critique; certainly those of Israel are no different. Yet as we lament from abroad the power of hardline rule and religious radicalism within the Jewish state, we should also ask ourselves how our own countries would fare, and indeed how they have fared, in responding to the criminal violence of terrorists. How many attacks would it take—or has it taken—for the views and identity of our own countries to be warped and woven into a consensus that war is the only correct response?

In order to meditate on Europe’s potential future, it may be helpful to study its recent past. To date, the one essential history of the wars of the former Yugoslavia was penned by the journalists Allan Little and Laura Silber. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is a stunning work, particularly for its success in getting the leading perpetrators on all sides of that genocidal war to speak, some with apparent glee, about their tactics. I once had the opportunity, however, to ask Silber directly a question I’d always had about her book. Your history does a tremendous job, I commented, in documenting the opinions and actions of the people who made the war. But where is the voice of the people who opposed the war? I asked. They didn’t have a voice, did they? was Silber’s reply.

I don’t remember what I said that day in return. I’m not even sure I did reply, or that I’d be able to now. But I can tell you a story.

During my first visit to Sarajevo, I spent a lot of time walking. It was January, 1997, just over a year since the shelling had stopped, and there was no building in the city that hadn’t been hit. The skin of buildings had been stripped back, windows were plastered in plastic, and the ornamental architecture had crumbled, leaving façades covered by either artillery acne or the scars of some more major surgery.

I had no official purpose for being there, so mainly I just wandered. The day that I walked from the river splitting the city up the hill to Vraca, though, was different. Nothing but rubble—you couldn’t even tell what the buildings on either side once were, impossible to imagine anyone had ever lived there, or that they possibly still were. In memory now, the level of destruction seems downright cartoonish, perhaps because envisioning a videogamer’s joy in chaos is the only way I have into the mindset that unleashed it. That day, though I didn’t stray from the asphalt, I still stubbed my toes on bricks and stones scattered across the pavement. Thus, like Dr. Johnson, did I refute idealism.

Later that day, back home from my walk, I studied a map of the city in order to retrace my steps. What I saw on it would have been no surprise to a more informed visitor, or to a more practised eye. The road I’d walked up, with its epistemologically unsettling level of destruction, was of course a former front line. Yet only when I saw that line traced on a map did I realize that it had also been traced, irrevocably and unforgivably, across the urban topography. An obvious point—but to someone who had yet to understand what the asphalt splash of a shell looks like, or recognize the track of a tank that turned on the street, a point worth making.

The point here is that, in the world we live in, tomorrow’s front line may well be anywhere at all. The voices today that clamor for us to draw up those lines, and close the blinds so we can’t see past them, will certainly be heard; indeed their shouts may be deafening. So where, we must ask, will be the voice of the people, the “common, saintly people,” those who oppose this next war?

My guess is we’ll find it in the streets of Paris.

 


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